


Kent Parson: Happy

by Anonymous



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: i'll tag this as canon divergent tomorrow let me live today, kent gets a cat, some past pimms but no actual jack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-16 14:12:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8105473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Kent spends a lot of time trying to answer the question, "When you think about yourself as happy, what do you think of?"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LydiaStJames](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaStJames/gifts).



> Rachel ( @lydia-st-james ) assigned me 2k words of Kent Parson being happy. As always, I took my assignment and ran in a different direction.
> 
> Mood music? Stranger by Noah & the Whale….or you know what? The entire The First Days of Spring album. It’s the ultimate “I had a messy break-up and I’m fucked up as hell about it, but I want to believe things are going to get better from here” album.

   “I’d like you start keeping a journal,” his therapist had said at the end of their last session. “Keep track of all the things that made you happy and unhappy and then in our next session, we can start to unpack a little of that.”

   And Kent had tried. He really did. On his way home from that session, he even stopped at a bookstore and bought a small notebook that he could easily slip in his pocket. He had flipped it open to two opposing pages and wrote HAPPY and UNHAPPY. The words had stared back at him and he pressed the book shut after his pen refused to write anything else.

    The notebook sat like a stone in his pocket for the next two weeks. Sometimes he took it out just to look at the blank pages and to try to think of something, anything, to write down. To show that he was trying. Most days his thoughts were snarls that would not untangle onto the blank page. On the days when they weren’t, he managed to write down banal, impersonal things just to fill the space.

 

**HAPPY**

Nice weather

Stray cat

**UNHAPPY**

Construction outside the condo

Bad game

Out of coffee

Neighbor

 

    His therapist doesn’t say so, but the next time Kent sees her, he thinks she might be disappointed. He thinks she probably secretly believes he doesn’t want to be there just because the sessions are mandatory. He doesn’t know how to tell her differently, so he doesn’t say anything at all after he finishes reading his sparse list aloud to her.

    Later, she asks, “When you think about yourself as happy, what do you think of?”

    He doesn’t know how to answer the question.

   After the session, he sits in his car and writes the question on the next blank page in his notebook, pressing the pen down so hard that he tears through to the next page.

–

    He’s in Boston for two days for a game and he can’t stop thinking about his therapist’s question: _When you think about yourself as happy, what do you think of?_

    He thinks he remembers the answer.

    Later, much later, after he gets back to the hotel and showers and sits in bed watching the TV mindlessly for hours, he pulls out his notebook and adds “Jack” to the UNHAPPY page.

–

    The next time he sees his therapist, he tells her that he doesn’t know if he’s ever really been happy.

    “Sometimes, the things or people that once made us happy can’t be that for us anymore,” she says. “That doesn’t mean the happiness they once gave us wasn’t real.”

   Kent doesn’t know if he agrees with that, but he wants to. He wants to think that he was happy with Jack, even if it was just for a little while. He doesn’t want to think about everything that came after being happy.

   “Tell me about Jack,” his therapist prompts gently.

   “He was my best friend,” Kent says.

    “Was?”

    “Yes.”

    “Anything else?” she asks, but it’s not pointed in the way that Kent has come to recognize. Still, he shakes his head no and looks out the window, ready for the session to be over that day. He can still count the number of people who know about him on one hand and he doesn’t think a therapist on the Aces’ payroll is really someone he wants to add to that list even if she seems nice otherwise.

   And it’s simple to not say anything. It really is. Kent had learned a long time ago that once people believed something about you, it was easy enough to let them to keep on believing it, especially if it was something like sexuality. No one wanted to believe that the Captain of an NHL team was gay, so as long as Kent flirted with women and disappeared with one on his arm occasionally, people were happy to believe that he was straight. That he was a playboy, even. Kent wishes he got half the action most people believed he did.

   When his therapist asks, “Why aren’t you best friends anymore?”, Kent has too many answers and none of them are any good. He twists in his chair uncomfortably and chews on the inside of his cheek instead. His therapist suggests he spends some time to think about it and lets him go. He almost says that he’s spent the last 5 years thinking about it and he’s so tired of thinking about it that he wants to punch a hole in the wall, but instead, he nods politely and sees himself out.

–

   It’s always especially bad on the days when he remembers that he’s not even supposed to be in Las Vegas. Jack is supposed to be here, captaining the Aces and winning two Stanley Cups. Kent was supposed to go second and he feels like he’ll never stop apologizing to Jack for it. When he thinks about why they’re not best friends anymore (or friends at all), Las Vegas is at the top of the list.

    When he finally shares this with his therapist weeks later when he’s come with a passable, sanitized version of the other reasons, her forehead wrinkles and for a moment, he thinks she’s going to tell him that she knows he’s not being completely honest and the point of therapy is to be honest, but instead she says, “Jack withdrew himself from the Draft, Kent, that’s not your fault.”

    It was, Kent knows, but can’t explain. He chews on the inside of cheek until it’s raw and bleeding and in his head, he lists all of the signs that he missed or willfully ignored that led up to Jack’s overdose. He knew. He knew. _He knew and he didn’t say anything_. It had always been his fault and he couldn’t fix it. Jack didn’t even want to come to Las Vegas anymore.

–

_When you think about yourself as happy, what do you think of?_

    He tears out the page that he wrote it on one day in frustration, balling it up and throwing it across the room. It bounces dully off the wall and lands on the floor. He leaves it there for days before finally throwing it away. It doesn’t help.

–

   The Aces are knocked out of the playoffs early that year and Kent dreads the long summer. He livestreams Jack’s graduation in May. He goes home to see his mom in June. He signs an 8-year contract extension in July. He trains. He sees his therapist.

    Two days after the contract is announced, she asks him, “Why is it do you think you haven’t put down any real roots here in Las Vegas?”

    “Roots?” he asks.

    “You still rent your condo, you’re not dating anyone regularly, you don’t have any pets,” she says. “You just signed an eight year contract, don’t you think it’s time to start?”

    “I don’t really like my condo,” Kent says because he notices the gender-neutral ‘anyone’ and wants to avoid it desperately. “And I’m allergic to dogs.”

    “It doesn’t have to be a dog,” she says. “And you can always move.”

    She doesn’t bring up dating again.

–

    He still has his therapist’s advice about putting down roots rattling around his brain when he goes to a bar with a few of his teammates who are also in town for the summer. On the back patio, a woman sits surrounded by small portable cages full of kittens and he’s two beers in when he wanders over and asks her about them. He sticks his fingers in one of the cages and three kittens bat at each other to compete for his attention. His teammates chirp him from across the patio but he ignores them and asks if he can hold the gray one. The moment the kitten is in his arms, it digs its claws into his forearm so hard that it draws blood. The woman tries to disentangle the kitten, but Kent just shrugs and cuddles her closer. He asks how much the adoption fee is and the woman looks at him like she can’t decide if he’s serious or not.

    The kitten hides under his bed for two days after he brings her home and can’t be convinced to come out for love or tuna. Kent calls his mother and she laughs at him and asks him who was going to take care of the cat when he was on the road. He looks up cat-sitters for three hours that night and then, when he turns out the light to go to bed, he sees the kitten dart out from her hiding place and gulp down the plate of tuna he’d left by the door.

    “Hey, kitten,” he whispers across the room to her. She doesn’t acknowledge him.

   “Hey, kit,” he tries again and is rewarded by a flick of tail. She looks back at him, giving him a long, calculating look before slinking back under bed again and he decides to count it as a win. He smiles to himself and lets his head fall back on the pillow.

–

    He gets the Falconers tape early and takes it home. He’d been watching Jack’s games religiously anyways; he hardly needs the tape review, but he watches it over and over again in every spare moment he has. He’s distracted and off his game the week before their showdown with the Falconers.

   He feels so tired every time someone asks him about Jack that by the time he gets to his therapist, he has run out of diplomatic answers and says, “I’m worried.”

    “Worried about the game?” she asks.

    “No,” he says, already trying to backtrack.

    “Kent,” she prods gently and most of the time, it wouldn’t work but that day it does.

    “I’m going to make it worse,” he says. “I don’t know how but I will.”

    “It’s okay to be feeling a lot of things before seeing Jack again, Kent,” she says. “It’s normal. He was a big part of your life once and now he isn’t.”

    Kent doesn’t say so, but he thinks that Jack is always going to be a big part of his life, whether he was in it or not. An inescapable spectre that haunted Kent and reminded him that nothing in his life was supposed to be his.

   He ends the session early and goes home.

    He puts on Jack’s tape again even though his game against the Aeros tomorrow should be the priority. When Kit hops into his lap and starts purring loudly, he sighs and turns off the TV. He buries both hands in her soft, downy fur and throws his head back on the couch. She purrs even louder, stretching up and into his hands to demand more attention. He gives it to her, petting until she rolls over and nips at him and then re-settles herself at the other end of the couch. He takes out his phone and snaps a picture of her and thinks that maybe he does have at least one thing that’s all his own doing.

    That night as he goes to bed, Kent opens his notebook up for the first time in a long time and flips to two blank pages. On one page he writes HAPPY and on the other he writes UNHAPPY. Carefully, under HAPPY, he neatly writes “Kit”.

**Author's Note:**

> if you had asked me last week, i would have been neutral leaning towards negative about kent parson and now i’m just a bundle of very complicated, sad emotions instead. life’s not faaaaair.
> 
> pssst when kent adopted kit, he also sponsored all of the other kittens’ adoption fees. i don’t make the rules. it’s just a fact.
> 
> ronanlynchisneversleepingagain.tumblr.com


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